Digital communication is well established by virtue of the Internet protocol (IP) that allows an electronic device to communicate to other electronic devices over a potentially world-wide network. In such a network, the electronic device, often referred to as Customer Premises equipment (CPE), is typically coupled to the wide area network (WAN) (e.g., over a digital subscriber line DSL), either directly or via a local area network (LAN).
CPE may be any type of electronic device capable of digital communication. For example, it may be a personal computer, a gateway or router, an electronic appliance such as a set-top box, a television set, an IP based telephone, etc. Many CPE devices allow remote management over the wide area network, which relates to auto-configuration and dynamic service provisioning, software management, status and performance monitoring and diagnostics. The DSL Home-Technical Working Group describes in DSL Forum (Recently, DSL-Forum has been renamed to BroadBand-Forum), TR-069 amendment 1, the CPE WAN management protocol (November 2006), an end-to-end architecture for remote device management. In this architecture, a CPE device in a local network connects to an auto-configuration server (ACS) that is capable of providing service level settings for services available to the CPE.
Typically, an ACS is dedicated either to a certain level of services (e.g. premium, best effort), a type of device (e.g. Home Gateway, Voice over IP telephone, set top box) or a specific customer group (e.g. business or residential). For that reason, it is adversely required that each CPE must be preconfigured before installation at the location of the customer to specifically address the proper ACS in dependence of the combination of options above available to the customer. Furthermore, a system of multiple ACSs may be used for flexibility or to improve robustness by introducing an element of redundancy into a system. To address the proper ACS, it will be required to pre-program the CPE with either a specific IP address or a specific URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for the dedicated ACS. However, correct information for the CPE may be held on multiple ACSs. Alternatively configuration of the CPE may be done during installation either by service personnel or by the customer, but this may be time-consuming and/or may be sensitive to errors and mistakes.